


Nico Hulkenberg's Bonsai Moves

by Eros_bittersweet



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:53:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14363445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eros_bittersweet/pseuds/Eros_bittersweet
Summary: This story is based based on my not-at-all-factual interpolation of an interview with Nico on Sky Sports, in which presenter Ted Kravitz corrected Nico on his pronunciation of "banzai moves" as "bonsai moves," which made me laugh for days, and then wonder: what if Nico really did mean to say "bonsai moves?"





	Nico Hulkenberg's Bonsai Moves

_“Banzai_ moves,” Ted Kravitz was saying to Nico Hulkenberg, jovially, as though he couldn’t believe that he got to make this correction on-air to yet another foreign driver butchering yet another word in the English tongue. “ _Bonsai_ would be a small-growing tree.”    
  
Nico froze, his face in a panicked smile, his eyes widening. He couldn’t believe this. After his teammate Carlos had mangled the word “feisty” as “feasty,” which he was pretty sure was not even a word at all, and as this happened immediately after Ted had handed Carlos the word on a veritable platter by saying it beforehand, he thought Ted would excuse Nico’s own slip of the tongue. He was certain Ted would think it a malapropism, and not anything further, though Germans were hardly known for their imprecision in speech. He knew that Ted, ever sure of his own rightness in dress and pronunciation, no matter the weather which blew past his perpetually bare shins, nor the imperfect accents which clanged in his broadcast-journalist ears, could never resist a good jibe. So long as Ted never suspected it wasn’t a mistake at all. Maybe if Nico generated enough awkwardness to last an eternity, Ted would be convinced.   
  
As he smiled in a crazed expression of disbelief, Nico’s mind wandered along the shore, to the beach, where he and his teammate Carlos had just played sand football, kicking up the surface with their heels until the shore was a mound of divots. Little did Ted know that after dark, before he could rest, Nico would walk down from his hotel room and rake the sand into an artistic masterpiece of straight and curved lines, finessing the landscape into perfection as he meditated. “The record for the longest tenure in F1 without a podium finish,” he’d mutter to himself, as he raked. Ted had told him that, as if he didn’t know it already. “ _Fuck,_ Ted. I won LeMans!”  
  
“You must be patient,” said the man he called Teacher, one day, after hours and hours of sand raking, after hours and hours of Nico talking the teacher’s ear off about Ted and his dumb statistics and why they didn’t matter and that he HAD won something in his racing career.   
  
“What is time, to this tree?” the teacher was asking, gesturing towards the miniature, gnarled specimen in the yard of the house where the teacher lived. After an incident which involved trading vulgar insults with a vindictive Danish competitor in front of the cameras earlier in the season, a Renault boss had handed Nico this man’s name and address on a piece of paper and ordered him to pay a visit. That was ten visits ago, and all Nico had done since then was rake his yard, and talk. Nico didn’t think it was helping him; the last few races had ended in DNFs, but the bosses were convinced that something magical was happening in this process, so they made him keep going. Nico thought perhaps the old man was just tired of raking and wanted some guy to do the yardwork for free; better if he were someone who fancied himself an important racing driver now forced to do stupid manual labour.  
  
“Tell me, Nico,” the teacher was saying. “This tree - how old is it?”  
  
“I dunno,” shrugged Nico. “It could be like a thousand years old.”  
  
“Not quite. It’s five hundred years old.”  
  
Nico sighed. He always found these lessons in humility and his own ignorance a bit tiresome. “Great,” he said. “I have, like, less than five years left in F1 to do anything, if I’m lucky.”  
  
“Look at the bark,” said the teacher. “See the scars on the tree, Nico. See, although the plant struggles for life, how it still flourishes; see how the texture of the wood, gnarled and rough, accentuates the beauty of the sparse needles.”  
  
“Kind of like how Alain Prost’s broken nose gives his face character?” joked Nico, but the teacher was unimpressed.   
  
“You jest,” said the man, looking at Nico severely. “But tell me, are the lines of his racing career, of his triumphs and his humiliations, not written on his face itself?”  
  
Nico was humbled, and stared at the ground. “I guess,” he muttered.  
  
“Consider the Bonsai,” instructed the teacher. “Consider the entire world, in the tree. Consider the way it moves. Can you see it move? It moves slowly. Its time is not our time. If you learn this lesson, the long years you have endured which you call barren and not verdant will have meaning for you.”  
  
The teacher went into the house, and Nico remained staring at the tree for hours afterwards. “Consider the Bonsai,” he muttered to himself. “Consider the way it moves.”  
  


* * *

  
  
Ted was laughing now. “It’s all right. I was only joking,” he was saying, to break the tension. Nico laughed, as if he, too, found it amusing. What an embarrassing mistake, he hoped Ted was thinking. _Bonsai_ Moves. Maybe someone would start a meme about it. Maybe they’d photoshop Nico into a Japanese garden, raking sand. Maybe the LeMans trophy would be at the centre of the garden, the “24” lettering at the top symbolizing the hours he’d conquered, now obscured by the roots and bark of the five-hundred-year-old plant he’d wind around the structure and leave for someone else to cultivate when he was long gone. Maybe his own two legs, cast in bronze, would be the only remnants of a triumphant statue of himself beside it. Maybe, around the statue, the lone and level sands would stretch far away.   
  
The camera cut to another view before it captured the moment of Nico’s existential heartbreak. It would have shattered the lens.     
  



End file.
